Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

Jez Butterworth’s ‘Jerusalem’ creates a comic vision focusing on the ambiguities, turmoil and hypocrisies of the society presented on stage. Butterworth focuses on the characters’ degeneracies in which the form of humour tends to be the exposure of their unruly behaviour and their reluctance to conform to social norms. “The most basic difference between comedy and tragedy lies in its central characters, who are not heroes, and often, as with Shakespeare’s Falstaff, are anti-heroic” The key character Johnny

Shakespeare once said “the course of true love never did run smooth”. Shakespeare’s story, “Much Ado About Nothing”, is about two couples and their will to stay together through it all. One couple, Beatrice and Benedick, attempt to overcome the complications of admitting their love for one another. The other couple, Hero and Claudio, struggle to know what is true and false about rumors that spread around about their significant other. The book features pairs of unlikely friends based on their different traits like Hero and Beatrice as well as Claudio and Benedick. In “Much Ado About Nothing” by William Shakespeare, Hero is a foil to Beatrice because of their distinct personalities, contrasting opinions, and differentiating actions.

play has the perfect Aristotelian tragic plot consisting of peripateia, anagnorisis and catastrophe; it has the perfect tragic character that suffers from happiness to misery due to his hamartia (tragic flaw) and the play evokes pity and fear that produces the tragic effect, catharsis (a purging of emotion).

Senex is the father of Hero, who is a Roman senator. The brothel ower character is Marcus Lycus who is the buyer/seller of beautiful women in the area. He is in this business for the money. Miles Glorious is the braggart solider, who is the captain of the Roman Army. The young maiden is Philia, who is still a virgin and the girl who Hero is in love with. Hero’s father also shows an interest in Philia as Philia thinks that Senex is the captain. Pseudolous is the slave that wants his freedom and works with Hero to try to get Philia to be Hero’s partner. Hysterium is the clever slave, because he has lied many times to keep things in order. Domina is the wife who is very

• The story begins with explanation of an old law that was directed towards men's daughters as well as introduction to Egeus and Hermia whom both live in the city of Athens. These are the main characters.

“Be Right down.” I text back as I pull open the glass door to the aged Orpheum theatre. Ambling into the lobby the familiar buttery scent of popcorn mixed with soda and old wood wraps around me and whispers memories of the last time I was here. After standing in line I check in I leave the lobby following the path etched into my mind from years of performing here. As I walk through the antique doors into the auditorium, I am struck once again by the beauty of the ancient theater.

For the last few weeks the topic of discussion has been Greek and Roman theatre. From dramatic situations, like death of a beloved pet, all the way to basic improv this lesson has been intense. New vocabulary words, a greater feeling of confidence and a more in depth knowledge of theatre was given to us. Which allows us to understand and explain the legacy of greek and roman theater and the impact it had on today’s entertainment.

Although Aristophanes’ Lysistrata is a form of Old Comedy, which satirizes the life of the polis, and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday is a form of English renaissance comedy, both plays evoke the comic process of role reversals or inversion. Inversion creates humor through the mixing-up of expected hierarchies by placing the lower caste members of society on top. Thus, role reversals offer short term liberation by reimagining the way of life, which creates the possibility to mediate polarized interests. For example, in Lysistrata, Aristophanes exploits the status of women as social outsiders and inverts their role to construct an alternative model to civic government. In The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Simon Eyre, a shoemaker, becomes

Commedia dell'arte played a crucial role in the history of Western theater, “its underlying satire and irony ultimately shaping the development of comedy on the dramatic as well as the lyric stages," (Fisher 17). This paper will discuss, first, commedia dell'arte's satirical performances, their circumstances, and their original audience, and tell how this theatrical form became well-known throughout Western Europe. It then will discuss two enduring popular stage works: Sterbini and Rossini's opera buffa Il Barbieri di Siviglia, and Beaumarchais's satirical comedy Le Barbier de Séville ou la Précaution inutile of

Commedia Dell'Arte was a new form of theatre created in mid-16th century Italy. The style of comedy they developed centered on people and their specific world. The styles and techniques of Commedia Dell’ Arte has impacted artists ever since then from Shakespeare to modern day television. When present-day acting methods don’t offer all the solutions, actors may look back and gather inspiration from the past.The multiple concepts about the acting practices, designs, teachings and comical personas of these past performers, provides a clearer perception of Italian comedy and its Winifred states in Commedia Dell’Arte that audiences were struck by the “fundamental perplexities connected”(Smith 18), because instead of creating a new successful form of entertainment out of thin air they made a combination of many practices upon the multiples stages in different impact in modern theatre, film and television.

Also, the comic operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan (1871-1896) were clever, tuneful and perfectly created – prompting new models of dramatic generation. After Gilbert and Sullivan, the performance center in Britain and the United States was re-characterized – first by impersonation, at that point by development. The best transformation in the American melodic venue up to that time came in 1927 with Show Boat, by Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern. Here we go to a totally new sort - the musical play as recognized from musical parody. Finally, came the joining of song, comicality and creative production numbers into a solitary and inseparable imaginative element. Here, at last, was a production with a predictable and trustworthy story line, dependable ambiance, and three-dimensional

The play starts with two roman officials, Murellus and Flavius, who order many commoners in the middle of the day to return back to work. Many of these people are in the streets celebrating Caesar's triumph against Pompey. Murellus reminds the commoners, a cobbler, in particular, of the time when they used to cheer for Pompey’s victorious returns from battle, however, due to recent differences in opinion,

“It is the constant aim of the management to prevent the use of a single word, expression, or situation that will offend the intelligent, refined and cultured classes” (Stein 23). This is the motto of ‘Mr. Chase’s Original Idea: Polite Vaudeville,’ a then unheard of yet soon widely popular subcategory of vaudeville theater in the early 1900s until the 1930s. In many places and in many time periods in the world, it is found that theater is not only considered prominent in culture but is often integral. This can be seen especially in ancient Roman and Greek culture, as the combination of theater, music, and dance were significant.

The basic plot of the play consists of a slave (Pseudolus) trying to buy his freedom from his owner, Hero, who happens to be the son of Senex (the father) and Domina (the mother). Luckily for Pseudolus, Hero has fallen in love with Philia, a virgin who is waiting for Captain Miles Gloriosus to come and claim her, because she has been sold to him by the proprietor of the House of Pleasure, Marcus Lycus. Hero would give anything in order to make Philia his; so he promised Pseudolus his freedom if and only if he could get Philia to be his. The majority of the play revolves around Pseudolus trying to arrange for Hero and Philia to be together forever. He runs into numerous obstacles, including a hysterical Hysterium, the slave-in-chief, and a bumbling old man, Erronius, who arrives home after being abroad for 20 years searching

Sometimes appearing as there is no plot to the play, the Theatre of the Absurd had non-linear plot developments and went against general theatre conventions. Things that were considered a structure of human life such as time, place and identity were often distorted to an extent where the characters became confused on where they were or who they were, and therefore easily fell out of the ‘rhythm’ of normal life and the way that people generally live.